Workshop on Southeast Asian Futures: Cosmopolitanism, Sovereignty, Subjectivity
The Center for Southeast Asia Studies and the Berkeley Southeast Asianists graduate group at the University of California, Berkeley are pleased to announce the Center's 20th annual conference:
A Workshop on Southeast Asian Futures: Cosmopolitanism, Sovereignty, Subjectivity
Friday and Saturday, February 7 and 8, 2003 on the University of California campus, Berkeley
[mailto:cseas@uclink.berkeley.edu]
Workshop Rationale and Goals
In the 1950s, the British anthropologist Edmund Leach felt increasingly "obliged to decry the tyrannical salience of politics for having led observers of 'Southeast Asia' to expect international boundaries to be culturally meaningful, to read the nation-state back into history, and to assume that territorial sovereignty must be absolute, exclusive, and as precise demarcated in life as on a map."* A half century later, this same tension between the fictive coherence and yet tangible restructuring of Southeast Asia as a socio-cultural, economic, and political region persists in the field of Southeast Asian studies. The purpose of this workshop is to revisit the theoretical concepts which scholars have used historically to understand the continuities, breaks, and dynamism of Southeast Asia, and thus, we hope, provide a stronger basis for exploring contemporary intra- and trans-national processes of reconfiguration. Consider, for example, the lingering ripples of the Asian Financial Crisis, the illegal flows of human & natural resources, the on-going struggles for democratization, the emergence of numerous "growth triangles" & the ASEAN Free Trade Area, and the range of responses to the United States's "war on terrorism": how do individuals and institutions in these various contexts attempt to legitimate their interests by invoking long-standing discourses of nationalism, while simultaneously redrawing and investing the boundaries between people and nations with new purposes? We believe such inquiry promises to promote critical reconsideration of the term "Southeast Asia" at a time when multiple fields of area studies face both ontological and methodological crises.
* Edmund Leach, "The Frontiers of Burma." Comparative Studies in Society & History 3 (1960): 49, paraphrased on page 13 of Donald Emmerson, "'Southeast Asia': What's in a Name?" Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15(1) (1984): 1-21.
Workshop Themes
We invite scholars from the social sciences and humanities to submit papers that examine topics such as (but not limited to) state and non-state politics, economic restructuring, violence, social movements, environmental conflicts, and migration either within or across Southeast Asian societies.
More specifically, we expect to interrogate both previous formulations of cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia studies by Oliver Wolters, Benedict Anderson and Anthony Reid, and contemporary theoretical engagements with cosmopolitanism beyond the margins of Southeast Asia studies. For example, what alternative or emergent forms of political association do current social movements, processes of state restructuring, and patterns of human mobility & migration in Southeast Asia suggest?
Additionally, we aim to explore how earlier explanations of state formation and reproduction in Southeast Asia, such as galactic polity, mandala, and the theater state, inform contemporary theorization of globalizing sovereignty in the region. For example, how do we rethink sovereignty in the context of the increasing interventions of multilateral institutions; the transborder flows of people, commodities, and knowledge; and the slippage between "terrorist activity" and internal and external military violence?
Finally, we seek to revisit both older conceptions of identity developed by James Furnivall and Clifford Geertz, among others, as well as more contemporary formulations developed by Southeast Asianists such as Ann Stoler and John Pemberton in order to explore how notions and images of religion, ethnicity, gender, class, and nationality (among other possible axes of difference) continue to change. For example, how do projects of state rule, media institutions, and religious organizations attempt to produce subjects such as "terrorists," "indigenous people," "migrant laborers," and the "Other," and how do people variously consume, internalize, contest, and reproduce these envisionings?
To Apply
Please contact Dr. William Collins, UC Berkeley CSEAS vice-chair, at cseas@uclink4.berkeley.edu for more information or to submit an abstract for the conference. Paper abstracts are due no later than Friday, October 18, 2002. Abstracts should describe the topic addressed and include a brief description of the evidence presented. Those selected will be notified by Monday, November 4, 2002. To submit an abstract by mail, please send it to:
Twentieth Annual Southeast Asia Studies Conference
Center for Southeast Asia Studies
2223 Fulton Street, Room 617
Berkeley, CA 94720-2318
Tel: (510) 642-3609
Fax: (510) 643-7062
Email: cseas@uclink4.berkeley.edu
Graduate Student Organizing Committee
Dorian Fougères, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management
Daromir Rudnyckyj, Department of Anthropology
Ellen Boccuzzi, Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies
Jerome Whitington, Department of Anthropology
Jodi York, Department of Sociology
Eric Jones, Department of History
Karen Greene, Department of Anthropology
Charles Carroll, Department of Education
Leslie Woodhouse, Department of History